Author: gr4c5

I write. I read. I cook. I run. That's me, in a nutshell.

Last Lion

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Manchester, William. Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill – Visions of Glory 1874-1932. Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1983.

The scope of daily life during Churchill’s lifetime is covered extensively in Manchester’s Preamble and Prologue to Last Lion. The changing social scene, the evolving cultures and ever-daring fashions are included; while these details are simple,  they bog down the biography making it long and tedious. The preamble and prologue to Last Lion are like an old buggy, a very slow start. As a result the first chapter doesn’t begin until page 110.

Once the reader gets to the real beginning of Manchester’s biography on Churchill the story is fascinating. Manchester does an amazing job including photographs and letters to illustrate Churchill’s fascinating life. Manchester’s style of writing flows freely. Humor gives the biography a certain sparkle.

Favorite lines, “Churchilll could be very difficult. When a plane was preparing to land and the NO SMOKING sign flashed on, he would light up a cigar. If he found himself driving in a traffic jam, he wheeled his car out on the shoulder or sidewalk and drove to the head of the line” (p 27). While those situations would annoy the crap out of me I couldn’t help but laugh at them, too.

BookLust Twist: From More Book Lust in the chapter called, “Winston Churchill” (p 44). Go figure.

Dec 09 is…

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December 2009 is promising to be an interesting month. I’m taking Kisa to the island for Christmas (his first winter visit ever – we’ve already consulted L.L. Bean twice). Doctors are weighing in on serious subjects (yours and mine) and I await every word with caught breath. It’s not always about me, but the waiting is just the same.
For books it is a simple month:

  • Tiepolo’s Hound by Derek Walcott in honor of December being the best time to visit the Caribbean.
  • Tortilla Curtain by T. Coraghessan Boyle in honor of Iowa becoming a state (Boyle was part of the Iowa Writers Workshop. He was also born on December 2nd).
  • Perma Red by Debra Magpie Earling in honor of Native American literature month.
  • Wonderboys by Michael Chabon in honor of Pennsylvania becoming a state.
  • Walls Came Tumbling Down by Babs Deal in honor of Alabama becoming a state.

I don’t think I have any nonfiction for the month. Strictly imaginary but oddly enough, nothing about Christmas this year. For LibraryThing’s Early Review program I found out I am supposed to receive Then Came the Evening a first book by Brian Hart. I snuck a peek at some Library Journal / Amazon reviews and this promises to be a heartbreaking story.

November 09 was…

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November was a very up and down, all over the place month. I started the month of November by worrying about breast exams and pap smears and ended it stressing about unanswered tests. I started the month worrying about Thanksgiving and ended it by wishing time with family would never end. In between I gave up my sirsy plate, rewrote an entire assessment plan, made a new friend, walked away from heartache, closed the door on an old chapter, and discovered a guilty pleasure. Speaking of guilty pleasures. For books it was:

  • Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling ~ childrens book. I read the stories about the alphabet and the first letter. Very cute.
  • Dingley Falls by Michael Malone ~ 560 pages of sexy, funny, soap-opera-like, over the top fun!
  • An Invitation to Indian Cooking by Madhur Jaffrey ~ a great reference tool for those who like Indian cuisine (yum!)
  • Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill – Visions of Glory 1874 – 1932 by William Manchester ~ 900+ page biography on part of Winston Churchill’s life.
  • The Plague by Albert Camus ~ in honor of Camus’s birth month (& a reread).
  • Last Best Place: a Montana Anthology edited by William Kittredge and Annick Smith ~ just exactly what it sounds like, an anthology about Montana.

For the fun of it I banged out Caddie Woodlawn by Carol Ryrie Brink in one night, thanks to a Phish show. If Kipling’s book is for children I would call Brink’s book for grade schoolers…

For LibraryThing & the Early Review program I finished Ostrich Feathers by Miriam Romm. There was a lot of heart and soul poured into the writing of this book! I also read and reviewed Penelope Holt’s The Apple. While both Early Review books covered the Holocaust (one nonfiction, one fiction) their styles were incredibly different. I found The Apple to be more soul-piercing, if that makes sense.

Note: Barbara Kingsolver came out with a new book on November 3rd. It has been torture not to run out and buy a copy for myself!

Plague

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Camus, Albert. The Plague. New York: Vintage Books, 1948.

I have to start off by saying I was shocked to discovery my library does not have a copy of The Plague in its collection. I don’t know why that surprises me, but it does. Maybe I will donate my copy?

In relation to timeline The Plague is simple. It covers the duration of a bubonic plague. The story begins with the death of rats. First, a few rats are found here and there until they are everywhere; dying by the thousands all across the Algerian city of Oran. Then, the plague increases in intensity and starts killing hundreds of people until finally, colder temperatures arrive and the plague is mercifully over. But, The Plague on a philosophical level is much deeper than the spread of a disease. Dr. Bernard Rieux is a doctor trying to save the community of Oran from the ravages of a plague. Even though Dr. Rieux patiently tries to care for everyone in the makeshift infirmaries most of his patients die. It appears to be a losing battle. Soon it is obvious the bigger question on Dr. Bernard Rieux’s mind concerns humanity. For him, the struggle between good and evil is all apparent. He observes how people react to the disease, are influenced by the disease, and are changed by the disease. In the end, the whole point of the didactic lesson for Dr. Rieux is that we all need someone. Rieux’s biggest discovery is that he is content to continue the crusade against any disease, any suffering, any pain or death.

BookLust Twist: From Book Lust in the chapter called, “100 Good Reads, Decade by Decade: 1940s” (p 177).

Confessional: Maybe this is my 21st century thinking, but I ridicule the idea of a man’s mother coming to keep house for him while his wife is ill. Can’t the man cook or clean for himself?

The Apple

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Holt, Penelope. The Apple. New York: York House Press, 2009.

Can I call this book righting a wrong? While it doesn’t go that far, I feel like it goes a long way to making a once-ugly story beautiful again.

The Apple is a love story based on “the Herman Rosenblat Holocaust Love Story.” If you don’t know anything about the Herman Rosenblat story The Apple is a sweet tale about how a young Jewish boy survives the Nazi concentration camps at Buchenwald. If you do know Rosenblat’s story The Apple becomes an explanation, a reasoning for the fabrication of a once-true (but not) romance during war; a story of love in hell. It give the lie a little more reason, if you will.

Rosenblat is a Holocaust survivor who claimed to have met his future wife during his imprisonment at Buchenwald. He was 15 and she was 9. He claimed she kept him alive by throwing an apple a day over the barbed wire fence, unbeknownst the to guards and other prisoners. Years later, supposedly reunited by a blind date, they fall in love and have been married ever since. Their story attracted the attention of the media and soon they were the darlings of the talk show circuit, including Oprah. Quickly, a book and movie deal were in the works. This amazing story needed to be told. Imagine everyone’s surprise when historians and holocaust survivors alike started crying foul. Details didn’t add up and soon Rosenblat was admitting he fabricated scenarios and embellished details. But, what of the wife? Surely she needed to corroborate the story in order to make it the romance of the century?

At times I found The Apple difficult to read. The subject matter is sobering, the details are intense. While it is considered a work of fiction, Hitler’s reign of terror really did happen. Concentration camps like Buchenwald and Treblinka existed as communities of torture and slavery. There is no denying the pain that Herman Rosenblat suffered and survived. Holt’s account of that time is raw and unflinching. Her writing is as strong as Rosenblat’s desire to bring a beautiful end to an otherwise painful history.

Ostrich Feathers

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Romm, Miriam. Ostrich Feathers. New York: Gefen Publishing House, 2009.

I had a hard time getting into this book. Maybe it’s from all the head-in-the-sand burying I did about the subject matter in the past.

I have always said reading translations were difficult for me. I cannot help but question situations and details and wonder if they haven’t been distorted by the translation. Miriam Romm’s slightly autobiographical story of the search for her biological father takes her back to Poland where she befriends an elderly man she secretly hopes is her real father. Their conversations and efforts to uncover the truth of the past are mechanical and false sounding. I blame this on the translation.  When Miriam laments that she is an orphan despite having a biological mother and sister I blame the translation for a loose interpretation of the word ‘orphan’. When Miriam contradicts herself about sources or when ages don’t add up I again, blame the translation. Chronological order is confusing as well.
But, probably the biggest obstacle I had to reading Ostrich Feathers was the lack of evidence her biological father even survived the Holocaust. It isn’t clear what detail led her to believe he hadn’t been murdered by the Nazis. What evidence did she have that would make her, an otherwise smart woman, cling to the improbability that this stranger was her father? It bothered me at the end when she suggests she used the old man to fuel a fantasy.
While Ostrich Feathers was written with obvious passion and intensity probably the best and most fascinating part of the story is Romm’s research abilities. The fact she was able to recover so much lost information and family history is really remarkable.

Confession: I was surprised “Carl” wasn’t included in the list of acknowledgements. Was he even a real person? Was his character created as a literary vehicle for telling the story?

Dingley Falls

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 Malone, Michael. Dingley Falls. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Jovanovich, 1980.

I chose Dingley Falls in honor of National Author’s Day being in November. Nothing more random than that.

Even if you didn’t know anything about Michael Malone you would swear his novel, Dingley Falls, is supposed to be a script, or at least the backdrop, to a titillating, slightly scandalous soap opera. The town of Dingley Falls, fictitiously located somewhere in Connecticut, is teeming with odd characters with even more bizarre stories to tell. It is as if the entire community has digested some mild altering hallucinogenic that causes everyone to come unglued. To give a few examples, mild-mannered Mrs. Abernathy suddenly ends up under a tree in the pouring rain having wild sex with a poet she has just met; post mistress Mrs. Haig is forced to retire because of a bad heart. It’s not the job that is stressing her out, it’s a snapping, snarling dog who chases her home five nights a week; Headmaster Mr. Saar has trouble controlling his sexual appetite and will wind up handcuffed to a bed in a seedy motel in New York City, naked and dead, if he isn’t careful. Mrs. Ransom tries masturbation for the very first time only to have some stranger catch her in the act.
The list of characters goes on and on, so much so that Malone needed to list his crazy community individual by individual at the start of his book.

When you discover Michael Malone has years and year of experience as the senior writer for One Life to Live then Dingley Falls begins to make sense. The heightened drama, the outrageous characters, the never-ending bizarre situations in Dingley Falls suddenly become par for the course…just a little more graphic with the sex scenes and violence, the things you can’t show as vividly on daytime television.

Favorite lines: “The elderly shut-in bought a new car every year – each racier than the last – as if she thought she could outdrag death if she only had the horsepower” (p 94). “‘Did you know that until I drink this cup of coffee, anything you know is knowing too much?'” (p 145). “He drank in order to pose count; not like Walter Saar, to get in touch with who he was, but to stay out of touch with who he might have been” (p 157).

BookLust Twist: In Book Lust and More Book Lust. This is a popular book in Pearl’s world. First, from Book Lust in the chapter called, “Southern Fiction” (p 222). From More Book Lust in the chapter called, “Michael Malone: Too Good To Miss” (p 160).

Invitation to Indian Cooking

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Jaffrey, Madhur. An Invitation to Indian Cooking. New Jersey: Ecco Press, 1999.

I have to start off by saying I love Madhur Jaffrey’s cookbooks. I own several and all of them are well-organized and beautifully illustrated (or have gorgeous photographs).

An Invitation to Indian Cooking might have been a more accurate title had it included the subtitle Getting to Know Indian Cuisines and Ingredients because Jaffrey not only invites you into the world of Indian cuisine she also includes history lessons and ingredient explanations in addition to recipes. While her tone is conversational I found it to be a little didactic at times. Her claims that Americans, on the whole, don’t know what well-prepared rice tastes like is one such example. Another drawback to An Invitation to Indian Cooking is its out-of-date information. Basmati rice, Jaffrey recommends, is readily available at specialty stores. That may have been true in 1973 when her first cookbook was published, but I expected the reprint to have some updated information. I also find it hard to believe that out of 50 states only 12 have stores that carry authentic Indian ingredients.
But, having said all that, I love the recipes Jaffrey includes in her first cookbook. I like her attention to detail and her comparisons between American and Indian products. For example, Jaffrey points out that American chicken is more tender than chicken purchased in India, therefore traditional Indian cooking techniques would not work well on an American-raised bird.

“The chicken available in American markets is so tender that it begins to fall apart well before it can go through the several stages required in most Indian recipes” (p 86).

If you are ambitious enough to make several Indian recipes at the same time Jaffrey includes a series of different menus to try.

BookLust Twist: From More Book Lust  in the chapter called, “India: a Reader’s Itinerary” (p 125).

Caddie Woodlawn

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Brink, Carol Ryrie. Caddie Woodlawn. New York: Scholastic, Inc. 1973.

Thanks to Phish and a midnight show I was able to read this in one night (my other November books hadn’t arrived yet). While Kisa listened to a live show from California I was nose-in-book for a few hours. This was cute and completely reminded me of the Little House on the Prairie series by Laura Ingalls Wilder.

Caddie Woodlawn is the quasi-true story about Caroline “Caddie” Woodlawn. I say quasi because Brink got her stories from her grandmother and she changed some of the details for the sake of the plot. Caddie is Brink’s grandmother (with a slight name change). As an impetuous, spunky tomboy, Caddie would rather run wild with her two oldest brothers rather than stay home and cook and sew with her more demure sisters. The whole book is about Caddie’s struggle to balance wanting to be a good girl while being a natural wild child.
The year is 1864 and the Civil War is raging to an end in the East while a different prejudice is infiltrating the midwest. The conflict between Native American Indians and the white man who invaded their territory is being fueled by ignorance, rumors and fear. Caddie is eleven years old and coming of age at a time when the country is doing the same thing.

Favorite line, “She whipped out her ruler, and laid it sharply across that section of Obediah’s person on which he was accustomed to sit” (p 68).

BookLust Twist: From Book Lust in the introduction (p x).

Just So Stories

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Kipling, Rudyard. The Complete Just So Stories. New York: Viking, 2003.

It took me a very long time to find a version of Just So Stories  that had the exact stories I was looking for. My library has a book that it calls Just So Stories but isn’t the complete volume of all stories. It’s missing the two crucial stories I needed for the Book Lust Challenge, ” How the First Letter was Written” and “How the Alphabet was Made.” 

Despite being published in 1902 I am glad I found a 2003 republication. Isabelle Brent’s illustrations are wonderful! She took some liberties modernizing Taffy and her father who were supposed to be ancient tribal people, but her depictions of animals are accurate and her use of color is great.

I only read two stories from Just So Stories, “How the First Letter was Written” and “How the Alphabet was Made.” Both were incredibly fun to read, especially aloud. Kipling pokes fun at the stereotypes of parents and children with names like, “Lady-who-asks-a-very-many-questions” for the mother and “Small-person-with-out-any-manners-who-ought-to-be-spanked”  for the child. In both stories the theme is the need for better communication skills and are meant to be read together. The first letter makes up the alphabet later on and one story is a continuation of the other. Rumor has it that both “How the First Letter was Written” and “How the Alphabet was Made” started out as oral stories, told to Kipling’s daughter Josephine in 1900.

Favorite line: “We must make the best of  bad job” (p 70 from “How the First Letter was Written”).

BookLust Twist: From More Book Lust in the chapter called, “Alphabet Soup” (p 11).

November 09 is…

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November is a bundle of nerves dressed as confidence. I am trying to be brave in the face of unknown in Indecision City. Thanksgiving looms large.

For books the list is short. Two of the chosen titles are monsters (each over 500 pages long):

  • Dingley Falls by Michael Malone (in honor of Malone’s birth month)
  • Empire Express by David Haward Bain ~ in honor of National Travel Month
  • Invitation to Indian Cooking by Madhur Jaffrey ~ in honor of November being the best time to visit India
  • Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling ~ in honor of November being National Writing Month
  • Last Lion: Visions by William Manchester ~ in honor of Winston Spencer Churchill

I will be lucky if I get to Last Lion since Empire Express is over 900 pages long. The other book I’m hoping to get to if there is time is Last Best Place by various authors because the best time to visit Montana is November and I’ve always wanted to go.

For LibraryThing and the Early Review Program I am reading Ostrich Feathers by Miriam Romm. I was notified in early October I would be getting it but since the book actually didn’t arrive until October 24th I have decided to call it a November book.  I also got word I will be receiving a November book. I guess I will be very busy!

ps~ I just received word my all-time favorite author, Barbara Kingsolver, is coming out with a new novel. Holy freak me out! I simply cannot wait! YAY!

October (2009) was…

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October has always been my “hang on”” month. It’s the month I hold my breath for while waiting for September to release me. This October was no different. It started with a trip to Maine to see West Coast family (and a great foggy run), a trip homehome andandand Kisa got to go (yay), Hilltop got a much needed haircut, there were a ton of new Natalie sightings, and, dare I say, the promise of a Hilltop Thanksgiving? The end of the month was a little stressful – a lump in the breast and a missing ovary. No wonder I read so many books and here they are:

  • Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis ~ sci-fi story about a man who is kidnapped and taken to Mars.
  • The Queen’s Gambit by Walter Tevis ~ coming of age story about a young girl who is a chess playing phenom.
  • A Fine and Private Place by Peter S. Beagle ~ a ghost story about a man who lives in a graveyard for twenty years.
  • Crocodile on the Sandbank by Elizabeth Peters ~ a mystery about two unmarried women traveling through Egypt and being pursued by a mummy.
  • The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan ~ nonfiction about the role of women through the ages (up to the 1960s when the book was written). Oh, how far we’ve come!
  • House on the Strand by Daphne du Maurier ~ a spooky tale about time travel.
  • When Found, Make a Verse of by Helen Smith Bevington ~ a commonplace book full of poetry, proverbs and excerpts.
  • Empire Falls by Richard Russo ~ a novel about small town life (read because October is the best time to visit New England).
  • The Natural by Barnard Malamud ~ a novel about a baseball player (read because October is World Series month).
  • In a Glass Darkly by Sheridan Le Fanu ~ a compilation of short stories all on the dark side (read in time for Halloween – you know…horror, fantasy, mystery, etc).
  • The Life You Save May Be Your Own: an American Pilgrimage by Paul Elie ~ biographies of Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy in one book (read for Group Reading Month).

For fun, I am rereading Mary Barney’s Ring That Bell (2003) because I want to challenge my cooking and make every recipe in the book. So far I’ve cooked/baked my way through nine recipes.

For the Early Review program from LibraryThing I was supposed to read Ostrich Feathers by Miriam Romm. It hasn’t arrived as of yet, so it may very well turn into a November book.

The Life You Save

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Elie, Paul. The Life You Save May Be Your Own: an American Pilgrimage. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003.

What do Flannery O’Connor, Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day and Walker Percy have in common? For starters, they are all authors who struggled not only with identity, but religious faith as well. It’s this search for religious truth through writing that binds them together. They conducted their searches and tested boundaries of Catholicism through the art of writing.  Mary Flannery O’Connor began her writing career in Georgia at a very young age and was considered a prodigy by many: Thomas Merton, just a couple of states north in Kentucky began his writing as a Trappist monk who wrote letters about his faith: Dorothy Day, while older than all the others, founded the Catholic Worker newspaper in New York: Walker Percy started out as a doctor in the furthest south of them all, in New Orleans, but quit medicine to become novelist. In time the group became known as the School of the Holy Ghost because of their pursuit of the answers to religion’s biggest questions. Paul Elie brings that School of the Holy Ghost back together again in a 2003 book called The Life You Save May Be Your Own containing biographies and literary criticisms of all four writers. Elie does a great job detailing all four lives and the times they lived in, but is more thorough with the women than the men. Flannery O’Connor gets the most attention while Thomas Merton gets the least.

I didn’t find any quotes that really spoke up or out, but my favorite part was Elie’s breakdown of Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer. I am almost tempted to read it again now that I have a better understanding of Percy and what he was trying to say.

BookLust Twist: From More Book Lust in the chapter called, “Group Portraits” (p 109).

Slipping Up

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Confession time. I have fallen off the path of documentation somehow. It all started when my list of accomplished (read) books for the Book Lust Challenge on LibraryThing wasn’t adding up with the list I keep in a separate spreadsheet. LibraryThing had 298 accomplished books and my spreadsheet claimed 297. What’s one book you might ask? Plenty. That means some author’s work isn’t fully accounted for.

So. I started to investigate. To my horror not only were my numbers off, but somehow I had missed reviewing 17 books. Well, that’s not entirely true. I reviewed them here, on WordPress, but somehow forgot to transfer the “clean” version to LibraryThing. For those not in the know: I post the same review twice. First I write a review complete with personal observations and favorite quotes on WordPress, then I cut out the personal stuff and post the drab, shorter  “review” on LibraryThing. Neither is really a “review” per se. I don’t critique the writer’s style, find fault with plot, criticize timelines, etc. I basically am out to prove to anyone who cares (mostly myself) that I read the book by saying a few words about the general storyline, characters, and so on.

So. Now I am in the process of searching for 17 missing reviews. Did they all make it to WordPress and not LibraryThing? I already found two that way. Was I hesitant to review an entire book when I only read one story or poem out of it? What was my problem with the review process? This will take some time to sort out. I’m afraid to ask the bigger questions. Did I just get lazy? Am I slipping up?

ps~ The missing 298th accomplished book? Native Son by Richard Wright.

In A Glass Darkly

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Le Fanu, Sheridan. In a Glass Darkly. Trowbridge: Redwood Press, Ltd. 1971

Every other “scary” book I have read for October pales in comparison to In a Glass Darkly despite being composed of short stories. Let’s face it, the stories no matter how short are weird. In a Glass Darkly is made up of five short stories (although “Dragon Volage” is long enough to be classified as a novella) that are a mix of ghost stories, horror, mystery and fantastic. Each story is a little stranger than the last which makes for the perfect Halloween-time read especially with the lights dimmed low. The book ends with the short story “Camilla” about a lesbian vampire who needs more than victims to survive. “Camilla” appears to have the most success out of all the short stories, prompting other authors to write similar vampire stories with greater success. 

“Green Tea” is about a doctor, Dr. Hesselius, who deals in the occult who is convinced his patient is being possessed by demons. The patient is Robert Lynder Jennings. He is a reverend haunted by a demon in the form of a little black monkey with glowing red eyes. When Dr. Hesselius meets the reverend he is convinced his afflictions are caused by excessive consumptions of green tea. His intuitions allow Rev. Jennings to take the doctor into his confidences and soon relates how the monkey demon came to haunt him. Things become more dire when Rev. Jennings admits the monkey has been making him do vile, unthinkable things. From here there is no turning back and the story can only end in tragedy.

“The Familiar” was originally written as “the Watcher” which I think is a better title. “The Familiar” is about a sea-captain, James Barton, who is being stalked by someone calling him/herself “the Watcher” (hence the better name for the title). The stalker turns out to be an ominous, little dwarf. After the dwarf’s appearances Captain Barton starts hallucinating voices and thinking an owl is out to get him. There is nothing he can do to stop the mental breakdown that is inevitable.

“Mr. Justice Harbottle” is a freaky little tale about Elijah Harbottle, a cruel and corrupt judge. His conscience starts to get the better of him after an unusual visit from a stranger. He begins to feel haunted by past prisoners he has unfairly put to death by his rulings. The hauntings become so severe that Judge Harbottle can’t escape the noose around his own neck.

“The Room at the Dragon Volage” moves away from being frightening (until the end) and takes on the genre of a mystery as the villans are human. I found the bulk of this story to be long-winded and boring. Maybe that is because it is the longest of the short stories in In a Glass Darkly (26 chapters equaling 176 pages) and really should be called a novella. It takes a long time for the story to come to a head. —- is too naive, too trusting, too innocent for my taste. He’s also too obsessed with a woman he’s only seen once. As the reader you have to suspect nothing good can come from this strange passion, especially since she is a married woman. This was my least favorite story of them all.

“Carmilla” is a good old-fashioned vampire tale. The kind that inspires others to write the same. The twist to this is that the vampire is female and lesbian. When a strange girl known as Carmilla is thrown from her carriage she is brought to the home of a lonely young girl. Hungry for companionship the young girl welcomes Carmilla into her home. Hungry for a new victim, Carmilla readily accept. The reader can see the plot coming from a long ways off, but the young narrator is slow to grasp the danger she is in.

Favorite line: “The Clerygman felt a chill of horror steal over him, while, during the wail of a sudden gust of wind, he heard, or fancied he heard, the half articulate sounds of rage and derision mingling in the sough” (p 65).

BookLust Twist: From Book Lust in the chapter called, “Science fiction, Fantasy, and Horror” (p 213).